Business.com Acquired by Yellow Pages Publisher

Print and online Yellow Pages publisher R.H. Donnelley Corp. has signed a definitive agreement to acquire Business.com for $345 million in cash and deferred payouts. Donnelley reportedly beat out Dow Jones and the New York Times, according to the Wall Street Journal.

RHD will add Business.com’s business search engine and directory and pay-per-click advertising network to its interactive unit, RHDi, which will now include DexKnows.com, LocalLaunch search engine marketing company, Business.com, Work.com and the Business.com Advertising Network.

Business.com founder and CEO Jake Winebaum will lead RHDi from Santa Monica, Calif., and will report directly to Swanson. The deal is expected to close in the third quarter of 2007.

Kate Kaye at ClickZ has more details from RHD and Kelsey Group analyst Neal Polachek.

This week, both LinkedIn and Facebook are beefing up their paid social offerings in different ways, while Google seeks to cut off Adwords revenues for fake news sites. And might Google be favouring desktop over its own AMP in its upcoming mobile-first index?

Here we’ll take a look at the basic things you need to know in regards to search engine optimisation, a discipline that everyone in your organisation should at least be aware of, if not have a decent technical understanding.